Assessing the Impact of Total Immersion on Cherokee Language Revitalization: A Culturally Responsive, Participatory Approach.

Peter, Lizette

This paper illustrates how the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is exploring a new paradigm of evaluation that is responsive to the claims, concerns, and issues of stakeholders involved. Known as culturally responsive evaluation, this alternative conceived by the Initiative for Culturally Responsive Evaluation (ICRE) is considered more appropriate than conventional methods for evaluating language revitalization efforts, because it is respectful of the dignity, integrity, and privacy of stakeholders in that it allows for their full participation, parity, and control. CRE is an open-ended, inductive approach in which the impact of the program being evaluated is discovered empirically rather than mechanistically. The Cherokee immersion team members created the Cherokee First Immersion Center for preschool children. They believe that such an approach, more than its conventional counterpart, is appropriate for both evaluating and enhancing the Cherokee Immersion Preschool Center and that it meets the ICRE's call for evaluators to recognize the legitimacy of diverse cultural patterns and perspectives, develop awareness of their own values and perspectives, accept children's culturally conditioned behavior without evaluating it as wrong, and develop a sense of security about evaluation with ethnically diverse populations. (Contains 13 references.) (SM)